Tossing salad...with LETTUCE, people!

I am very food oriented. I love to cook it, eat it, read about it, daydream about it. When I get particularly stressed out or anxious, I often have fantasies about carrying one of those boxes of tiny oranges around (satsumas, cuties, mandarins--whatever) and just beaning people in the head with one when they piss me off. That, or carrying around a bag of fresh cherries and spitting the pits at people when they get on my nerves. Sometimes, when I am bored, I imagine getting a garbage bag and filling it with shredded lettuce, then going up to people in the air so it falls on them like confetti and shouting, "Lettuce have a party!" Because I'm bad at puns. (You're just going to have to cope.) The fun thing with the lettuce is that they wouldn't really have grounds to get all that mad. It doesn't hurt, it isn't THAT much of a mess. It's just fucking confusing. Especially if you are at work. Or the proctologist's. Whatever. Maybe you work in a proctologist's office, I don't know and it's not my business. What I do know, is that you're not expecting to have lettuce thrown on you. And that is what makes it fun.

My vivid food imagination plays out in other ways as well--some good, some gag-inducing. When I am at Costco or one of those bulk stores and I walk by the vats of "Extra Heavy Mayonnaise" (who in the name of crack-loving-kittens tasted mayo and was like, "This is good--but not heavy enough! Could we possibly add some more fat to this whipped vegetable oil? Because it just isn't leaving a slimy enough coating on my mouth and throat."? If you find out, let me know. I'd like to smack them with a knee sock full of cat-pee jello.) I cannot help but imagine sticking my arm in the monstrous jar up to the elbow and swirling it around. (Have you gathered that I don't care for mayo? Because you're wrong. That is a serious understatement. I detest mayo, and so of course can smell it from 10 feet away.) This grosses me out to no end (which amuses Jsun to no end), so all it takes is Jsun tickling the back of my neck and I involuntarily shriek from the sheer ickiness. Which, I am sure, makes everyone around think I am a freak--but they probably already thought that if they watched me while away 5 minutes determining which economy size bottle of pills makes the best maraca, or if they noticed that I periodically punch or kick random grocery items in the store, or if they saw me try and start a marshmallow bag pillow fight, or...

Occasionally my food visualization is more ambivalent. At same said bulk-stores, I often find myself standing in front of the ginormo cans of nacho cheese, pondering. I know I am game to sit in a bathtub of nacho cheese. And I strongly suspect warm would be the nicest, but I think cool/room temperature would be nice too. I'd like to get other people's opinions on the matter, but no one else seems to think about this shit.

Most of the time my tactile food proclivity just leads to disappointment. I desperately want to swim in a pool (full size, in-ground type pool) filled with whole milk, but that will never happen. Aside from the wastefulness, where would I get that much milk? And who is going to let me ruin their swimming pool? I would also very much like to sit in a claw footed bathtub filled with either creme anglaise or warm melted chocolate. All of this had led me to believe that I should try to attain a pornstar-type body and start a sploshing website and find people to pay for me to do these things. Because, really, I can't figure out where to fit a bathtub full of chocolate into my grocery budget.

There is one long time food fantasy that I did live out. Since I was in high school (maybe even before then) I have wanted to do pudding wrestling. Not in a sexual way, I just wanted to play in a wading pool full of pudding. Finally, in my mid-20's I decided that I had better get off my ass and get it done. So I did. I got a big ole inflatable wading pool. I took measurements and did the math to figure out how much pudding was needed for the desired depth (gleefulest math ever). I bought 66 gallons of tapioca pudding (the kind that comes pre-made in cans). Some people did not understand the choice of tapioca over chocolate. I do not understand some people. Tapioca has a bajillion little fish eyes in it! It was the ideal tactile choice. Ultimately, a great time was had by all. After everyone else got tired of playing in the pudding, I spent about an hour lying in the pool making pudding angels. Despite repeated showerings, I smelled like pudding for 3 days. There are not words for how much that delighted me. (I was like one of those Strawberry Shortcake smelly-dolls!)

There is a whole world of tactile food experiences most people never even think about, example: cornstarch massages. (These are spiffy, but messy. Maybe that makes them miffsy.) The fact that I frequently involuntarily think about coating myself in whatever food substance I happen to be looking at (or thinking about) means I may be disappointed a lot (like how I can't imagine how to set myself into a jello mold without getting hypothermia), but it also means that if I ever find myself with a tanker truck full of milk, I will have some very good ideas what to do with it.